Atmosphere makes hip hop bridge to indie kids

Rhyme and reason

By Mike Prevatt

Every summer music festival has its obligatory hip hop act, and last year Warped went with an obvious choice: Atmosphere, a Midwest trio that has won a devout following with both backpack (read: indie) hip-hop heads and the emo constituency. How were the Coheed and Cambria sect seduced? On one hand, you have to credit the lyrical skills of Slug (a.k.a. Sean Daley), renowned throughout the underground for his earnest and often self-deprecating rhymes. However, the 31-year-old MC, who owns Minneapolis DIY label Rhymesayers, has another theory.

"If you see me on stage and you're an indie rock kid and you look at the way I dress or wear my hair, you're going to relate to me better than 2Pac," he says. "You might be able to listen to a 2Pac record and really feel what he's talking about; when he raps, he sounds like he means every single thing he says. But there's still going to be a level of, `Hey, I grew up on the outskirts of the city listening to Bad Religion and so I don't really relate to what 2Pac was saying.' Our stories aren't very street--it's about what goes on in our homes and heads. It's think it's more accessible to those kids just because of the fact we look and talk like those kids."

On Atmosphere's latest and most acclaimed album, 2003's Seven's Travels, Slug tries his hand at socially conscious themes, while also remaining loyal to the diary-rap aesthetic--the latter a happy medium between the girl-troubled Mike Skinner of U.K. act the Streets and the strident narrative styles of Eminem. While the revealing wordplay in either approach might be new for much of his audience, it's nothing hip hop hasn't seen before. Slug points to his childhood heroes--KRS-One, LL Cool J and Big Daddy Kane, among others--to show that, despite wide praise as a groundbreaker, he's merely continuing a tradition.

"In the '80s, there was always a dedication to teaching the kids," says Slug. "There was always a message. You might have three or four songs rippin' the heads off other rappers, and then you had maybe one or two songs about a girl, but there were always those songs on the record about either social or personal issues, and I kind of feel that I'm a part of that. The difference is, nowadays, a lot of the revolutionary concepts that these people bring to the table are more about personal revolution than necessarily social or political revolution. But I still think it's the same vein of what KRS-One was doing."--Mike Prevatt